


How I Did It: ACD Canon, "The Empty Hearse," and Sherlock Fandom

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: ACD Canon, Fandom, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, explaining the fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:54:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonfiction. In which I talk about how "The Empty Hearse" works as Gatiss's commentary on <i>Sherlock</i> fandom, with special reference to Anderson's metamorphosis into Sherlock's biggest fan, and the question of whether Sherlock's explanation of How He Did It is trustworthy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How I Did It: ACD Canon, "The Empty Hearse," and Sherlock Fandom

# 

 Having finally had the chance to sit down and re-watch “Empty Hearse,” I like it much more than I did the first time. That’s because it was only on the second viewing that I really picked up on some of the nifty meta-things that “Empty Hearse” does with ACD canon and with the whole Sherlock Holmes fan phenomenon. It helps that noticing these things makes me more willing to accept Sherlock’s explanation to Anderson about How He Did It as true. (If it isn’t, NOBODY TELL ME. I still haven’t seen SIGN OF THREE or HIS LAST VOW yet.)

"Empty Hearse" appears kind of incoherent at first, though some of that is obviously deliberate disorientation done specifically to yank the fans’ chains. Still, even if in the end you’re willing to believe that  a connection between John’s kidnapping and the terrorist plot will eventually be revealed, it’s harder to understand what the hell  _this_  guy is doing in that episode. It appears to have been set up just to give us the chance to see how Molly handles the sidekick role and to see Sherlock being upset over the rift with John. Wasn’t till the second viewing that I realized that the “skeleton mystery” is their updating of the locked-room mystery that brings Holmes back to London in the ACD story “Adventure of the Empty House.” 

In “Empty House,” Watson and Holmes meet again because they’re both interested in the mysterious death of the Honourable Ronald Adair. He was shot to death while alone in a locked room, and nobody can figure out how. Watson goes out to the crime scene to investigate, where he runs into Holmes disguised as an elderly bookseller. Watson doesn’t recognize him until Holmes comes to his house, doffs the disguise, and causes Watson to faint. That scene ‘happens’ twice (reversing the usual order, the first time it’s tragedy and the second time it’s farce), once in the recognition scene at the restaurant and then in the scene where John attacks the elderly patient who’s trying to sell him porno mags and DVDs which by curious coincidence have the exact same titles as the books the disguised Holmes is carrying in “Empty Houses.” There, again, Gatiss is yanking the ACD fan’s chain; if you know the canon story, that scene suckers you into thinking John’s right, till you both find out he’s horribly wrong.

What’s going on with the skeleton hoax is more complicated. Like the Ronald Adair mystery, it’s attracted tabloid attention due to its apparent impossibility; it appears to involve a victim who died alone inside a sealed room. Its apparent irrelevance to the plot is maybe a comment on “Empty House” itself: the Adair mystery is kind of pedestrian, the solution is riddled with problems, and as a case it’s interesting only because it brings Holmes and Watson back together, which is of course the REAL story. 

It gets more interesting when we discover that Anderson deliberately set the hoax up as a way of tempting Holmes into coming back to London. The Anderson of Series 3 is so different in just about every way from the Anderson of Series 1 & 2 that he may as well be a new character. Not only is he visually unrecognizable, what with the crazy beard and the lunatic eyes, but his attitude toward Sherlock has done a complete 180. Basically, what they’ve done is turn him into a meta-commentary on Sherlock fandom. If the show is Sherlock and the ordinary viewer is John, Anderson is The Obsessive Fan. Now, as we all know, the only honest definition of “obsessive fan” is “a fan who is more obsessive about the show than you personally are.” Gatiss himself, for instance, is obviously a Sherlock Holmes fan from way back, or this show wouldn’t exist. It was the original Obsessive Fans who brought the original Sherlock Holmes back; Doyle was trying to get rid of him for real, but the fans wouldn’t let him, and eventually he caved to the pressure. The hoax is Anderson’s attempt to do the same thing: bring Sherlock back through the power of his own fannish desires. 

The fan thing is really more important to this episode, I think, than anything else. You would expect the title “The Empty Hearse” to have something to do with How He Did It; but in fact the only thing it refers to is the fan group Anderson founded for the purpose of pooling fan energy and trying to will Sherlock back to life.

The placement of Sherlock’s confession to Anderson, which totally baffled me at first, starts to make more sense as an expression of Gatiss’s ambivalence about  _Sherlock_  fandom and especially our obsession with trying to figure out How He Did It. John, modeling the Not Obsessive Just Totally In Love With Sherlock Even Though He’s Not My Boyfriend fan response, tells Sherlock after he gets into the 13 possible scenarios that he doesn’t care about  _how,_ he cares about  _why._ Accordingly, Sherlock gives the explanation not to John—who’s more worried about what’s really important, viz the grand yet suppressed emotions of the Sherlock/John partnership—but to the guy who stands in for the people who REALLY care about it: the Obsessive Fans. The fact that this explanation is presented to us as an annoying intrusion into a major dramatic moment in the Sherlock/John relationship is another dig at the Obsessive Fans: look, they made us cut into what’s REALLY important for this How He Did It bullshit. I can’t wait to get  back to that subway car, can you?

So, the first time I watched “Empty Hearse” I thought that Sherlock’s explanation was just another hoax, like the dramatizations of the two fan theories (both of which, I’ll just point out, provide tantalizingly incomplete gratification for both Sherlolly and Sherlock/Moriarty shippers). I thought this because as Sherlock is leaving, Anderson starts raising objections to the theory and then freaks the fuck out; and because, at the end, John asks if Sherlock’s ever going to explain how he did it. After all, Sherlock must still loathe Anderson and be pretty pissed off at him.

On a second viewing, though, with all this in mind, it reads differently to me. Sherlock’s explanation makes a lot more sense than the first two dramatizations, is consistent with the most obvious cues given to us in “Reichenbach Fall,” and doesn’t involve egregious violations of the laws of physics or existing characterization. If it is true, well, it evacuates some of my favorite Sherlock emotional reactions from “Reichenbach Fall”—I rather liked the idea that things were spinning out of control and he couldn’t keep up with them—but whatever. Anderson’s rejection of the theory, I now opine until proved wrong later, is just another expression of Gatiss’s love-hate relationship with the Obsessive Fans. After getting the real story, Anderson does exactly what Gatiss must have known a lot of the hard-core fans would do when they got the long-awaited explanation: 1) He’s disappointed that it doesn’t coincide with his own speculations; 2) He questions its plausibility; 3) Since he doesn’t like it, he invents reasons to reject it. Sherlock leaves him to it…knowing that he has just exacted the best revenge he could ever have had on Anderson. He’s given Anderson the truth, which deprives Anderson of his newfound purpose in life. Even worse, he’s done it in such a way that Anderson can choose to reject it—which means that he will go on being tormented by Not Knowing…Forever. And so can we!

The message is clear: Don’t Fuck with Sherlock Holmes! Also, Obsessive Fans, get the fuck off our backs. We know the solution won’t satisfy you. Nothing will satisfy you people. Stop obsessing about plausibility and just enjoy what you’re really here for—which is Sherlock and John and the rest of the gang.

I find this a little unkind; the show would die without its fans, after all. But I can also sympathize with the anxiety they must have felt about how people would take it when they finally got around to writing the Return. 


End file.
